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Ubuntu Gnome Remix 12.10 Arrives For Testing 175

sfcrazy writes "The first ISO (alpha) images of Gnome Shell edition of Ubuntu is now available for download and testing. The Gnome edition of Ubuntu will bring back a lot of hard-core Gnome Shell fans who were looking elsewhere to get the pure Gnome Shell experience. Both Fedora and openSUSE are doing a great job at offering Gnome 3 Shell experience and the arrival of Ubuntu GNOME Remix will give the project the audience it needed."
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Ubuntu Gnome Remix 12.10 Arrives For Testing

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  • I don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I've been a Linux user for a few years now and while I've seen great strides made in desktop aesthetics and usability, I still can't with a pure conscious say that any of the DEs are as good as or better than what comes on Windows or OSX. Windows is without a doubt snappier and the taskbar has a lot of nifty and intuitive features. I can get past the artwork, fonts, and icons on Gnome/KDE/Xfce/etc. as I get that good artists cost money and that's not something these groups have in spades but basic usabil

    • Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 03, 2012 @01:29AM (#41211057)

      ...continued

      Take the window previews in Windows. I used to have those with Compiz and you can enable them in Unity but the implementation is buggy. When you mouse off of them, a lot of the time they won't go away so you have to mouse back over again. Also on Windows, you can grab the bottom of a window and pull it down to the taskbar to get a maximize vertical state. Why can't I do that in Linux? Another thing that rocks with Windows is if say you download something and you right click and select "see file in folder", when the file manager opens, the file is already selected so you don't have to hunt around for it. This is a small thing but it makes a huge difference by eliminating extra work. Also, if I select "Single Click" in the Nautilus settings, why doesn't the file picker respect that? And why is the file picker stuck on "details" mode? I'm pretty sure that KDE doesn't have these problems by the way but it has other ones. The main one being how much slower than GTK based DEs it is. I haven't tried it since probably 4.6 though so this could be fixed by now.

      Anyway, there are many things I like about Linux on the desktop that Windows doesn't have like focus follows mouse (a must for multiple monitors), being able to mouse scroll a non focused window when I don't have ffm turned on. I love the way the notification tray in Unity looks and works. It's super consistent and writing plugins for it is a breeze. I also like the dock in Unity with how easy it is to add functionality to a launchers right click menu something that Windows and OSX people can only dream about. I just wish Linux didn't fall down on the simple things. I really want that auto file select thing.

      • Another thing that rocks with Windows is if say you download something and you right click and select "see file in folder", when the file manager opens, the file is already selected so you don't have to hunt around for it. This is a small thing but it makes a huge difference by eliminating extra work.

        That is a nice touch for those rare occasions when you want to both open the folder and the file, but most of time you either want the file or the folder and not both.

        An important long-term goal of virtually every active UI project is to rely less on folder structures and more on tagging and search, so it's understandable that developers don't spend their limited time on polishing folder-oriented tasks. I agree though that it's a shame that they're apparently spending their limited time on removing features

        • by pspahn ( 1175617 )

          That is a nice touch for those rare occasions when you want to both open the folder and the file, but most of time you either want the file or the folder and not both.

          Speak for yourself. I use "see file in folder" at least 95% of the time I open a downloaded file.

          • Then you're probably doing something very specific over and over.

            Perhaps you're moving a downloaded file from your downloads folder to a different folder, device or other location? That should really be handled by the app that initiates the download, i.e. the web browser, but AFAIK nobody has solved it in a really elegant way yet so for now we're stuck with the file manager.

            • by pspahn ( 1175617 )

              Not quite. It's because of the right-click menu. Just because I download a zip file doesn't mean I want to open the zip file... Maybe I want to extract here, maybe somewhere else. Or maybe I've downloaded an image file that I want to edit in Photoshop, or crop in Irfanview, etc.

      • by Knuckles ( 8964 )

        Also on Windows, you can grab the bottom of a window and pull it down to the taskbar to get a maximize vertical state. Why can't I do that in Linux?

        You can do a similar thing in Unity (and have been for a while): you grab the window's title bar and drag it up to the global menu for full-screen or to the right or left screen edge for vertical maximizing (and using half the screen horizontally). I know it's not the same you do in Windows, but I thought I'd mention it. More at http://askubuntu.com/questions/28086/what-are-unitys-keyboard-and-mouse-shortcuts [askubuntu.com]

    • by mvar ( 1386987 )

      Windows is without a doubt snappier

      This is probably the biggest issue for me (along with the lack of mainstream games)

      • by fa2k ( 881632 )

        The problem is that you can't benchmark "snappiness". It's easy to count the number of seconds it takes to boot, and distro developers seem to get fixated on that. Response time involves CPU scheduling and throttling, the graphics subsystem, I/O scheduling, prefetching, caching, etc. (probably too obvious to be "insightful", but I'll post it anyway)

    • Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Robert Zenz ( 1680268 ) on Monday September 03, 2012 @04:26AM (#41211673) Homepage

      ...and the taskbar has a lot of nifty and intuitive features.

      Like what?

    • I've been a Linux user for a few years now and while I've seen great strides made in desktop aesthetics and usability, I still can't with a pure conscious say that any of the DEs are as good as or better than what comes on Windows or OSX. Windows is without a doubt snappier and the taskbar has a lot of nifty and intuitive features.....

      I know YMMV, but my experience has been exactly the opposite. Every time I boot my wife's Acer laptop into Windows 7, I'm just appalled at how spongy the UI feels, how slow it is to load programs, and how truly awful the fonts look. I suppose I could get used to it if it was my only option, but I find nothing "intuitive" about anything in the system, and anything I remember from the XP era just gets me into trouble.

      As quickly as possible, I get back to the safety, security, performance and -- yes -- usabili

  • Linux Mint (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If you want Gnome 3 technologies on Ubuntu, without the awkward UI, Linux Mint has a default UI called Cinnamon which moulds Gnome Shell into something usable by humans. Give it a spin.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by collet ( 2632725 )

      I actually used gnome shell for more than five minutes and don't really want to go back to windows 95.

      "Blah blah blah proven interface blah blah blah fuck change"

      It's still better.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by collet ( 2632725 )

        Also I think switching distro JUST for a different DE is retarded.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by paulatz ( 744216 )

          Also I think switching distro JUST for a different DE is retarded.

          Especially when you are switching to a bug-infested ubuntu clone

        • Well, Mint is not just a different DE. It's generally better about "just get all this shit working" stuff, like drivers or Flash support.

          More importantly, you can install the Debian variety instead of Ubuntu, and enjoy some unmolested packages.

          • Linux Mint Debian Edition is the best 'desktop' release out there right now in my opinion. It's a rolling release so it is always up to date with Debian testing (or if you are brave unstable).

            Plus a whole lot of stuff in the Mint repositories that make it a good desktop.

            • I've had three separate goes with LMDE. First when it had just come out, and honestly I blame myself for that - you just don't try a distro before several months of testing by the public have passed. Video drivers wouldn't work, and it was full of bugs.
              Second time just for kicks, as I have a business box that I don't really need but that's too worthless to sell, so I keep it as a backup computer and for those "ooh, new distro, let's check it out" moments. I couldn't get a positive feeling with it; things di

        • by jbolden ( 176878 )

          I don't. The software is all pretty much generic on Linux at this point. Distributions only offer two things:

          a) How they tweak the software and integrate it
          b) How they configure their repository

          Given that (a) is a good reason to switch.

        • by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

          Depends on how the respective distro handles the DE.

      • by epyT-R ( 613989 )

        blah blah blah fallacy blah blah blah..

    • by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      mint has the problem of including a bunch of half assed junky widgets that seem to always break

      pass

  • by Anonymous Coward

    They turned it from "Linux for Humans" to "Linux for morons". Trust broken. The damage is done. The certainty's gone. The spirit altered.

    • by pointyhat ( 2649443 ) on Monday September 03, 2012 @01:51AM (#41211133)

      Unfortunately "Linux for Morons" is the only thing likely to grow market share as most humans are morons.

      I dont blame them really - for most people, it's just another appliance.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Unfortunately "Linux for Morons" is the only thing likely to grow market share as most humans are morons.

        Of all the things keeping Linux off the desktop, I'd put complicated desktop environment at best around 15th. Gnome 2 was at least as easy to use as Windows XP was for example. I'd say the number one issue is lack of third party support. It's just not very easy to get started developing for Linux. There is no "Visual Studio" standard. I mean, what are you supposed to use? Vim and Glade? Get real. In order for interesting "long-tail" applications to appear on Linux, you have to make development cut a

        • by vurian ( 645456 ) on Monday September 03, 2012 @06:58AM (#41212137) Homepage
          "There is no "Visual Studio" standard. I mean, what are you supposed to use? Vim and Glade? Get real." Qt Creator. That's a really excellent development environment.
          • KDevelop is starting to get there as well. It's still a bit buggy and needs some usability improvements (such as more automatic ctags stuff), but it's made quite a bit of progress and keeps getting better. I personally quite like the feature that gives each local variable its own tint (saturation can be adjusted in the config, mine's at ~10%); It takes a few hours to get used to and therefore not be a distraction, but once comfortable, the color coding makes visually scanning code easier to track. It's not
            • I second Kdevelop. I use it at work, its fast, lightweight and has all of the features I need from an ide. There is one crazy bug still in there that causes a random crash when hitting a closing bracket }, but it doesn't lose data even if you haven't saved for a while. I hit that maybe once or twice a week.

              QT Creator is good too, Kdevelop is just faster for me.

              • Yeah, nastiest bug I've encountered was from early kdevelop4. I canceled the "make project" dialog, and the project directory hadn't been entered, and was ~ (and not marked invalid due to no project name). Canceling it did an rm -rf ~/*.
          • Yes there is: Eclipse CDT (for C/C++) and JDT for Java.
      • Unfortunately "Linux for Morons" is the only thing likely to grow market share as most humans are morons.

        I dont blame them really - for most people, it's just another appliance.

        But morons ask non-morons for OS advice. Morons pay attention to what non-morons use, and then use that.

        The trick is a balance. Make it usable for morons but hidden beneath the surface is everything a geek wants. This is how OS X became so successful. No one trusted Mac OS in the 90s not b/c only a small niche used it, but b/c the wrong niches used it. No one turned to their graphic designer or teacher friends for computer advice. Then OS X comes out and geeks flock to it - most as their third OS and they j

        • Make it usable for morons but hidden beneath the surface is everything a geek wants.

          So, kind of like Gnome-shell, a simple intuitive interface, with a plugin infrastructure that lets developers change just about anything?

    • by captainpanic ( 1173915 ) on Monday September 03, 2012 @04:49AM (#41211745)

      They turned it from "Linux for Humans" to "Linux for morons".

      I love them for that. No, I am not kidding.

      But no jokes aside, Linux is not a single system. Ubuntu is for the complete n00bs (like myself), but there are still plenty of other Linux versions for the better-informed people like yourself. Stop complaining and shop around a bit. Most are easy to download.

    • by drdaz ( 994457 )

      I've been using Linux for the past 10 years or so. I choose Ubuntu as my Linux of choice.

      How am I a moron for choosing an environment where most things work, out of the box, without me having to spend days fucking about? You can be sure that whatever I'm trying to actually achieve with the machine will take plenty time, so not having to configure everything about the OS is a distinct advantage.

      My time is valuable to me, and Ubuntu saves me time. I fail to see how this is moronic.

    • Try this obscure distribution, forgotten these days. It's reliable and you can set it up as you like.

      http://www.debian.org/ [debian.org]

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 03, 2012 @01:30AM (#41211061)

    Yeah, I'd really like to synergize with the upcoming Gnome shell paradigm shift to leverage the richness of the polished experienceness-ness. Thanks, Slashdot, for letting me experience the bullshitness of experienced PR bullshitters with experience.

  • You could quickly and easily already apt-get install a nice gnome setup pretty easily in Ubuntu so I think its a little silly they keep making new spinoff distros for different choices on what packages you want to install. I'd think it would be better for everyone if they kept it all as 1 distro with a few more options during the install process to choose what type of desktop you want, or if you want a serve,MythTV interface (mythbuntu) , or educational setup (edubuntu) . The torrent image is almost don
    • I think its a little silly they keep making new spinoff distros for different choices on what packages you want to install

      I'm pretty sure the only officially supported version of *buntu at this point is Ubuntu. Everything else is done by the community not Canonical.

    • by dgp ( 11045 )

      $ sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

      How is this fork any different/better than Ubuntu 12.04 after installing the gnome-shell package?

      • by detain ( 687995 )
        At this point, its got a newer version of Gnome. Beyond that I'd say its convenient for people with no or slow internet connections to already have the packages they plan installing on the installation medium. Since this is a test release you cant expect too much. I ran into a few issues starting X after install so I cant really comment much more on what is different/better.
      • by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

        How is this fork any different/better than Ubuntu 12.04 after installing the gnome-shell package?

        For one, you don't have to run that command. =)

        Also, it provides a live CD for those who are interested in trying it without committing any changes to their own system.

    • by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

      It's really not a separate distro so much as it is an Ubuntu ISO bundled with some different packages. They are just giving it a different name so you know what you're getting.

  • Whenever these kinds of articles are brought up, there is NO insightful discussion whatsoever. It's sickening, really. Instead of actually contributing to a logical discussion, every single comment on these kinds of articles says, more or less, "lol GNOME 3 sucks and only morons would like it because it's obviously trash; use a DE that actually makes sense". The problem with this kind of comment should be painfully obvious, but apparently it's not so simple with most of you. People say this in EVERY FREAKIN

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by oakgrove ( 845019 )
      I'm a big fan of Unity and I see it get slagged off all the time typically by people using outdated or incorrect information. If I'm in the mood I just calmly respond explaining what I like about Unity and talking up some of its features that might go unnoticed to a user that hasn't given it much time. I rarely get flamed and often the post gets modded up enhancing the visibility of a Unity "success story". As far as Gnome 3 goes, I've tried it a few times and there are some things I like including Mutte
      • by jbolden ( 176878 )

        Mostly if you are using Gnome 3 on Gnome 2 style hardware it might very well be a downgrade. Where Gnome 3 will shine is in more versatile form factors. Other than that:

        1) Integrated messaging and notifications.
        2) Much better handling of virtual desktops.

        Is about it.

        • by Nursie ( 632944 )

          Integrated messaging and notifications if you use our approved messaging client

          And most folks seem to think the virtual desktop stuff is actually far, far worse.

          • by jbolden ( 176878 )

            Integrated messaging and notifications if you use our approved messaging client

            No any Gnome 3 messaging and notification system would work. If by approved you mean it has to use the OS API's well yeah.

            And most folks seem to think the virtual desktop stuff is actually far, far worse.

            I haven't seen a good debate on this anywhere. Do you have a link?

            • by Nursie ( 632944 )

              Well yes, any gnome 3 messaging service, so that means empathy. Other things that used to work in the systray equivalent are relegated to a semi-transparent life elsewhere in the UI, for no good reason can tell. This is not useful, especially where there are protocols and services empathy does not support. I have yet to hear any good reason why other systray/notification area apps are not allowed, but it fits in with the whole "you can't customise anything" ethos, as well as the record of just throwing thin

              • by jbolden ( 176878 )

                I have yet to hear any good reason why other systray/notification area apps are not allowed

                Because Gnome is a GUI. GUIs are free to set standards. They've defined a standard notification system. It makes it easier for application developers if they can be assured that if they use the Gnome API for notifications everything will work fine.

                That's the reason. That's the reason any OS sets any standard.

                Also the fact that the dynamic nature of them means that things are not always in the same place.

                I c

    • by epyT-R ( 613989 )

      ok so your argument boils down to yet another "only tolerate positivity/censor everything else" post. There's a lot of that going around these days. Anyway, why should the critics be silent? Sorry to ruin your day, but adult human beings realized that the world isn't limited to simple positive/negative dichotomies by the time they're 9.

      You sound like that 'leave britney aloonuhhh' guy/girl/mantywaist....person.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      Whenever these kinds of articles are brought up, there is NO insightful discussion whatsoever. It's sickening, really. Instead of actually contributing to a logical discussion, every single comment on these kinds of articles says, more or less, "lol GNOME 3 sucks and only morons would like it because it's obviously trash; use a DE that actually makes sense". The problem with this kind of comment should be painfully obvious, but apparently it's not so simple with most of you. People say this in EVERY FREAKING COMMENT ON THESE ARTICLES! There is no originality whatsoever! Look, WE GET IT! You guys don't like GNOME 3! Just shut up then and leave the people who do like it alone!

      It's not about you, it's about Gnome. I'm glad you like Gnome 3. I don't. It removed too many capabilities that I depended on all day every day, and not all of them have well-known ways to get them back. Or, from what I can tell in some cases, any way to get them back.

      If Gnome 3 had been an alternative Gnome, or an option to something that preserved the capabilities of Gnome 2, I wouldn't care, but it was made the default desktop for Fedora 17. It took me from a cluttered but functional desktop to a clean d

    • by jbolden ( 176878 )

      I happen to like Gnome 3 as well. On the other hand the Gnome community quite aggressively aimed to be the standard Linux desktop, not some obscure piece of software. Obscure software has the right to do what it wants. Public utilities have an obligation towards the public good. They were the ones that wanted this degree of focus. And as the standard desktop for free software they then decided on a development path that alienated their most important distributer (Canonical) technical directions that up

      • This isn't a discussion about GNOME 3, though. This is about a completely optional distribution for people who already like GNOME 3. That is what the article is about and I just wished people talked about that instead of the exact same rants we get all the time.

        • by jbolden ( 176878 )

          This is a vanilla Gnome 3 with Ubuntu repository. Ubuntu / Unity is a Gnome distribution so not too much has to change. The main issue of controversy I can think of specific to this product is whether this should exist as a distribution, and not just a package at all, and I did see a few posts on either side of that one. But mostly I don't see much to discuss. This wouldn't have been a bad article for /. to just skip.

          But if we are going to discuss it, in theory the real controversy should be over Ubun

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I mean, this is just another flavor of 'buntu. Slashdot doesn't cover them all, and this one is simply Gnome 3; it's not a reversion to the 2.x world. So, what's the hook? Why is this project particularly newsworthy?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 03, 2012 @02:35AM (#41211279)

    Without [6809.org.uk] the stupid rounded corners, oversized borders, transparency crap, fancy gpu and cpu hogging bullshit of Gnome and KDE. No stupid compositors that require ridiculous effects that are recipe for X crashes and stalls... Run it with a straight Nvidia OpenGL driver and Google Earth will actually run smokin' 3D flight sim even on my old P4 with a really old Gforce 256 meg AGP card. Dump pulse audio and just use good old alsamixer, and every bit of software that I want to run like VLC, Audacity, Handbrake...and the likes runs just fine without relying on stupid video compositors that hog cpu and gpu cycles. X has come a long way and to clobber it with the same crap that one would expect from a Windows PC is just plain stupid. On good hardware the speed of running a slimmed down DE is really worth it and I feel is the real future of Linux.

    I try the same thing with Gnome or KDE on the same hardware and poof nothing but dog squats and rapid crash restore action on the screen.

    I am thinking of doing a series of setup vids and instructional vids on how to make a killer cheap Linux box that will do Citrix, GoogleEarth, Flash, all office document formats, play bluerays and all other media and do it faster than any other system in existance.

    Linux can be the fastest OS ...period.... if you do your setup right and leave the fancy effects to the programs not the FRIGGING DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT!

    Don't get me wrong Gnome and KDE have their good points but good video performance and speed is not one of them they have become far to complex and fail at the basic task of doing what the user requests in an unobtrusive manner.

    • No stupid compositors that require ridiculous effects that are recipe for X crashes and stalls...

      Funny how often that completely invalid position is repeated. Your graphics card is optimized for 3D acceleration. You have a little supercomputer sitting there waiting for you to ask it for help. Compositors take a lot of the workload off your slow main CPU and offload it to that supercomputer. If you can get the round corners and wiggly windows for free because your graphics card is the end result of a few billion R&D dollars making it good at that stuff, why not? Especially with something as slow and

      • No stupid compositors that require ridiculous effects that are recipe for X crashes and stalls...

        Funny how often that completely invalid position is repeated. Your graphics card is optimized for 3D acceleration. You have a little supercomputer sitting there waiting for you to ask it for help. Compositors take a lot of the workload off your slow main CPU and offload it to that supercomputer. If you can get the round corners and wiggly windows for free because your graphics card is the end result of a few billion R&D dollars making it good at that stuff, why not? Especially with something as slow and power-hungry as your P4, I'd rather let the coprocessors do as much of my desktop's work as possible.

        Nothing is free... Yes the GPU does a lot... However, the GPU still needs to be told what to do and given the information to do it.
        The GPU will take care of your 2D and 3D effects and physics (depending on the age and quality of your graphics card) without a direct impact on the CPU. However, the CPU still needs to spend time looking for input events to determine when the GPU should start those effects. The memory still holds this information on the effects. The system bus still needs to transfer the data

    • Actually, KDE is my desktop of choice because not only it can run fast without compositor, you can also disable it on-the-fly without any noticeable change. So you can have composition for the "exposé"-like features, taskmanager thumbnails and other things (that can come in handy when doing coding or sprite editing) and disable it when you need speed for a game or something.

      Kwin is a really solid window manager, can be given a ton of automation options (such as "make this window appear with this

  • Nice, a cheery article worded like an advertisement, for all the GNOME 3 haters on Slashdot to get on their favorite horse and start spewing rage.

    Yes, I'm OK with GNOME 3. No, I don't care what's going on with Ubuntu these days. Canonical's increasing preference for NIH-motivated development means there are less people funded by them to fix real problems.

    • by epyT-R ( 613989 )

      don't forget the people who claim they don't care, but still post for the chance to label any criticism as 'hate.'

  • by aglider ( 2435074 ) on Monday September 03, 2012 @03:58AM (#41211575) Homepage

    This is, in my opinion, the reason why Ubuntu will die.
    They did the same when they dropped a working KDE 3.5 in favour of an unusable KDE 4.
    KDE chose to move to v4, but this doesn't mean that Ubuntu needed to follow.
    The same applies to GNOME with the Unity twist.

    The biggest value for Ubuntu/Canonical is the user base. Make them angry to loose both them and your value.
    Say after me: I'll listen to the user base!

    • This is, in my opinion, the reason why Ubuntu will die.

      You can say that as often as you want, the "I like this because it's shiny" userbase is bigger then the "I want to get work done so how do I disable this shit?" userbase. We* are the niche, not the others. See iPhone/iPad and Android.

      * "We" as in: Mate, Gnome2, KDE3, Xfce, bare-window-manager users. Personally I recommend Sawfish and Mate. I also like KDE4 to a certain extend, good ideas, but too much shiny-stuff.

      • I am not arguing about the desktop/window manager of your choice. You can install whichever you like.
        But Ubuntu/Canonical took a number of questionable decisions and kept them despite the complaints.

        KDE4, as of now, is quite usable and stable. The way I use it is very similar to KDE v3 as I have disabled all the fancy stuff.
        I am not using KDE v3 (or trinity) because it'd be too much work to have it working.
        Finally, I'm considering a switch to Awesome which is ... aehm ... awesome!

    • by macraig ( 621737 )

      Linux developers don't listen to their "user base". Instead they listen to their "muse"... which is apparently a six-foot-tall invisible rabbit named Harvey (or Anthony, for you Doc Martin fans).

    • by jbolden ( 176878 )

      The biggest value for Ubuntu/Canonical is the user base. Make them angry to loose both them and your value.

      Mark Shuttleworth doesn't agree with you. He think the biggest value for Ubuntu is the potential. He's not looking to be the most popular distribution in a 1% marketshare OSes. You may not like it, but understand where you stand. Both Canonical and the Gnome Foundation are very unhappy with the blown opportunities of the last decade.

    • The biggest value for Ubuntu/Canonical is the user base. Make them angry to loose both them and your value.

      Among my friends, they generally like or at least tolerate Unity. In the Ubuntu Software Center, the most recent (later than March 2012) reviews average 4 star.
      I, personally, like it very much. It saves screen real-state and:
      1) Provides direct buttons for all the programs I commonly use
      2) For other programs, I just hit Super and type the first letters of the program name

      It is perfectly convenient.

      I thi

  • by aaaaaaargh! ( 1150173 ) on Monday September 03, 2012 @05:00AM (#41211781)

    I'm using Ubuntu as a desktop environment for daily work for years now and switched to XFCE recently. The reasons are quite simple, people know them already, but allow me to reiterate them infinitely:


    10 PRINT "I want a traditional, unobtrousive desktop environment ('desktop metaphor') with hidable and freely configurable panels and some way to define command shortcuts."
    20 PRINT "I also strongly prefer normal windows with minimal, user-definable decoration, ordinary menus (on the top of windows), and a fast file browser."
    30 GOTO 10

    All of this has existed for a long time and there was no reason to change it. I use whatever session/window manager gives the above features to me. There are plenty of choices besides Unity and Gnome 3, e.g. XFCE works fine for me. Sorry if that offends Gnome 3 or Unity developers for some odd reason.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 03, 2012 @05:06AM (#41211795)

    I ran that command in Ubuntu Precise a while ago, and, since then, I'm a happy camper.

    I don't have much beef against Unity, it's just that on low-spec machines or in a VM, Unity 2D is not snappy enough compared to the "no effects" version of Gnome, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a 2D version.

    I am still impressed at how easy it was to switch to Gnome, with no side-effect or additional tweaking required.

  • Why always the ISOs? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Richard_J_N ( 631241 ) on Monday September 03, 2012 @08:27AM (#41212567)

    There are very very many distros out there that exist as "respins" or "custom editions" which are basically debian + package-selection. For example, dyne:bolic, musix, ubuntu studio, kubuntu, ubuntu-gnome-remix. Why aren't they just published as: base-distro + package-repository + taskel (list of packages to apt-get) +
    settings to change + (optionally) list of packages to remove?

    I've never understood this - it hugely increases the maintainer workload, makes it harder to migrate (need to reinstall), makes it harder to try out, makes it harder to have a mixed system, and make it a real problem if the distro maintainer quits.

    Perhaps someone can explain this to me, because I am truly puzzled.

    Aside: yes, I recognise the advantage of, say, xubuntu (as a more minimal base-system), and I know that Kubuntu can be installed with "apt-get install kubuntu-desktop" - but why do most systems insist on clean-install from ISO as the primary (sometimes only) way to install them?

If all the world's economists were laid end to end, we wouldn't reach a conclusion. -- William Baumol

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